Fishing for Tigers (2 page)

It had become dark without my noticing and the street below was as empty as it ever got. Six or seven motorbikes passed by, honking at the clear space in front of them. Across the street, a
driver rested on the back of his bike, his ankles crossed over the handlebars. Nearby, a grey-haired woman in yellow pyjamas squatted in the gutter scrubbing an aluminium pot.

‘Is she homeless?'

I jerked at the sound of Cal's voice. ‘What?' I followed his gaze to the old woman. ‘No, no. She'd live along this street somewhere. Probably behind that little green door there. People often wash-up outside. And cook and wash clothes and bathe children. Homes are so small, you see. And a lot of them don't have what you'd consider a proper kitchen or they have to share one with others in the block.'

‘Do you have a kitchen?'

‘Yeah, I have to. My neighbours would die laughing if I came down and started chopping up veggies and boiling broth on the street.'

‘That's why you have a kitchen? Because the locals would tease you if you didn't?' He had that flat, uniquely-teenaged tone that somehow suggested both outrage and indifference. ‘I suppose you'd have an outside squat dunny, too, if it wasn't for the locals repressing you with their insistence on foreigners pissing inside.'

‘Ouch.'

‘I'm just saying.' His gaze was still on the woman in ­yellow pyjamas. His long fingers tapped against each other and the muscles of his jaw popped and fell. The awareness that he knew I was watching him washed over me and I lifted my phone and pretended to be checking the screen.

‘I didn't mean to offend you,' he said after a minute. ‘I'm just a bit spun out by it all. People living like that—' he nodded towards the woman who was now standing and balancing the empty washing bowl on her head – ‘which I expected, because Vietnam's poor and everything, but then Dad's place is really nice. Twice the size of our flat back in Sydney. Ducted air-con and marble benchtops and all that.' He squinted at me accusingly. ‘Do you have marble benchtops?'

‘No, but I wouldn't feel bad about it if I did. I've done my time in rat-infested, four-storey walk-ups with death-trap spiral staircases and squat toilets. But then I realised how stupid it is to try to prove you belong by living like the locals – the least affluent of the locals, at that. As if choosing to go without hot running water could turn an American into a Vietnamese or a rich person into a poor one.'

He sighed. ‘I guess that's true, but it doesn't mean it's right.'

‘Goodness, this has become terribly serious. We're supposed to be celebrating your arrival. Matthew's been so excited to have you here at last. How long are you staying?'

Cal stretched his arms over his head and made a show of inhaling the night air. ‘Don't know yet. I'm meant to start uni in February. I've already put it off a year, but I might defer again. Stay here a while then travel around a bit.'

‘What are you going to study?'

‘Journalism.'

‘Like your dad.'

‘I guess. But that's not why I'm doing it. I just really like writing and I like talking to people and finding out how life works, so I figured . . . Mum's not keen on it, though. She kind of hates journalists. Thinks they use people. Take their most intimate stories and painful moments and turn them into breakfast-cereal placemats.'

‘Harsh.'

‘Oh.' Cal half-smiled. ‘You're not a journo are you?'

‘No. I work with lots of them, though. I edit a magazine. The kind that takes people's stories and turns them into – well, not cereal placemats, probably more like
bánh mì
wrappers.'

‘Sorry. Anyway, I don't agree, obviously. Some are scum, I know, but not all of them.'

‘Not your dad.'

Cal shrugged. ‘Wouldn't know.'

‘You haven't read his work?'

‘A little bit. His paper isn't online and it's not like his reports are syndicated or anything. You know, when I started planning for this trip, I decided I should study up, get some up-to-date info. I tried reading this book on modern-day Vietnam, but it was like a fucking economics textbook so I gave up. Then I set up a Google news alert, so I'd at least keep up with the big news stories out of here. But most days all the stories are about the US, not about Vietnam at all. “Iraq is not another Vietnam”, “Vietnam Vets protest pension cuts”. So I gave up on that, too. So here I am and I have no idea what's going on.'

‘Oh, no one has any idea what's going on here. It's one of the attractions of the place.'

‘Oi!' Kerry's voice leapt out of the background hum of chatter and motorbikes and electricity. ‘Mischa! Come and back me up here. Henry's talking absolute shit about visa extensions again.'

‘Duty calls,' I said and Cal hooked his arm into mine and led me back to the table like it was his own.

Later, after I'd drunk far more than I'd intended, I found myself resting my head on Matthew's shoulder as we shared the last cigarette in his pack. I was dizzy from the unfamiliar rush of nicotine, from the gin and beer, from Matthew's unexpected fingertips on my lips as he held the cigarette there for me.

Across from us, Cal put down the plastic umbrella he'd been twirling and waved a finger from his father to me. ‘What's this about? Something you need to tell me, Dad?'

‘What?' Matthew smoothed my hair, bent and sloppily kissed my eyebrow. ‘Didn't I mention that Mish is the love of my life?'

I blew smoke in his face. ‘Cal, it's really quite remarkable the effect you have on your father. He's like a new man. A new, fun, likeable man. I may fall in love with him after all.'

‘What do you mean
may
? You've loved me since you set eyes on me. Cal, did I tell you, the first time Mischa saw me she literally swooned? You've never seen a woman so delirious with desire.'

‘Oh!' I sat up, knocking Matthew's chin with the top of my head. ‘That's right. The day we met . . .' I slumped against him again. I had remembered something Matthew said on that day and I almost repeated it now, stopping myself when I saw that Cal was watching me.

‘That was a crazy day,' I said and Matthew laughed and kissed my forehead again. ‘God, you really are marvellous tonight, Papa Matty.'

Cal made retching noises, then asked if he could order more food.

On my first day in Hanoi six years ago, jet-lagged, hungry and numb with shock, I'd wandered away from my hotel and got mindlessly lost in the ancient, winding, cacophonous streets of the Old Quarter. In a street lined with men carving tombstones I found myself breathing into a wall. I don't know how long I stood like that, my forehead and palms against the cool, rough brick, with the chiselling of stone and the roar of motorcycles and chatter of language swirling around me. It couldn't have been long – as I quickly learnt, a tall white woman with dark red hair is never left alone for long in Hanoi – but it felt like hours. Even my memory of it is protracted; I feel I leant into that wall for at least as long as I had spent on all of the planes I had caught in the week leading up to it, from LA to Perth to Sydney to Bangkok to here.

Someone took my arm and led me into nearby cool dimness. Blur and noise and then I was sitting down and something cold and wet was pressed onto my face and then my neck and then my forehead. There was a drink in my hands and the chilled, sticky sweetness revived me enough that I had a moment of worry over the cleanliness of the ice clinking in the glass.

‘Thank you,' I said to the girl blinking over me. She said something in Vietnamese and I was saved from not responding by the man I only then noticed sitting across from me. He was as pale as I was, although several days of stubble darkened the lower half of his face. He answered the girl in what sounded to me like fluent Vietnamese and she giggled and scurried off.

‘Always making people laugh,' he said in an Australian accent. ‘Even when I'm just asking for a bottle of water. How're you feeling?'

‘Better,' I said and drank some more liquid sugar. ‘Not used to the heat.'

‘How long you been in Vietnam?'

I couldn't make sense of it. I knew I hadn't spent a night in the hotel where I'd left my bags, hadn't even eaten a meal. I knew the sun was as bright outside as it had been when I'd climbed into the
Bài airport cab. ‘Not long,' I said finally. ‘A few hours.'

‘Ah. It can be overwhelming at first.' He took the water bottle from the giggling waitress and passed it to me. ‘Hell, I've been here five years and I still get overwhelmed sometimes. How long you staying?'

I gave him the answer I'd given my sisters in Sydney. ‘I don't know. It depends. If I like it I may never leave.'

‘Really?'

I shrugged as though it made no difference to me. ‘Do they have food here?' I asked.

‘They do, but I wouldn't recommend it. I was actually on my way to lunch when I saw you lurching about out there. If you're right to walk, there's a terrific
stand around the corner.'

I went with him and didn't feel too bad when he and the old woman behind the stove laughed at my clumsy attempts to scoop and slurp like a local. He told me his name was Matthew, that he was a journalist with the local English-language newspaper, that he lived in an apartment near the Hanoi Opera House and that he would never leave Vietnam at all if it wasn't for his son back in Australia.